Iowa AG Brenna Bird attends Trump’s hush money trial

No Iowa taxpayer dollars were spent on Bird’s trip to New York, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Attorney General’s Office said. In a statement provided by her office, Bird said she was in New York “to stand with President Trump.”

Trump faces 34 state counts in Manhattan Criminal Court of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to a former pornographic film actress to ensure her silence over an alleged affair between her and Trump in 2006, shortly after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son.

Separately, Trump also faces charges related to allegations of removing classified documents from the White House and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. All told, Trump faces 91 state and federal felony counts across the different cases, according to tracking by the Associated Press.

He also is facing a series of civil actions, including a New York case where a judge has ruled he and his companies must pay $355 million for a scheme to deceive lenders by offering financial statements that overstated his wealth. That case is on appeal.

“Politics has no place in a criminal prosecution. I am glad to stand with President Trump in New York today in opposition to the ‘lawfare’ being waged against him,” Bird said in the statement. “It is clear that (President Joe Biden) and his far-left allies will stop at nothing to silence President Trump’s voice and keep him off the campaign trail by keeping him tied up in court. It is wrong, it is election interference, and our country deserves better.”

Bird endorsed Trump in the 2024 Iowa caucuses.

A staple of Bird’s 2022 campaign for Iowa Attorney General was her pledge to sue the Biden administration for what she believed to be federal overreach on his policies. Since becoming Iowa’s top attorney in 2023, Bird has used the office to sue the Biden administration at least 17 times, including eight in the past two months, according to Iowa Attorney General Office records.

Bird also spoke at a news conference Monday in New York. According to video posted by the Des Moines station KCCI-TV, Bird called the charges against Trump “a scam and a sham,” and repeated her call for politics to be removed from the courtroom.

Iowa Democratic Party state chair Rita Hart issued a statement questioning whether taxpayer dollars were used to fund Bird’s trip to New York — the Attorney General’s Office said they were not.

“Even more so, Iowans deserve an Attorney General that’s focused on serving her constituents — not her political ambitions,” Hart said in the statement.

Monday was a key day in the Trump hush money trial: it featured the testimony of former Trump confidant Michael Cohen, a key witness for the prosecution. Cohen told jurors that Trump approved hefty payouts to stifle stories about sex that he feared could be harmful to his 2016 White House campaign, according to the Associated Press.